Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Staunton, November 16 – Igor
Karmazin, a correspondent for “Moskovsky komsomolets,” says that Krasnopol Kray
is “on the bring of a major inter-ethnic conflict, the economic situation there
is horrifying, the exodus of the local population is intensifying and local
residents themselves now call their region a Russian Kosovo.”

And that situation, he continues,
raises the question: how can regions so different “coexist” in the framework of
the North Caucasus Federal District?”

Stavropol’s residents of a few
decades ago have been “voting with their feet – the outflow of the
Russian-speaking population from Starvopool and largely from its eastern
districts, is colossal. One can say,” he adds, “that over the course of five to
ten years, the region has changed its face in a significant way.”

“There are two main causes:
migration pressure and economic problems.” That sounds paradoxical, but it isn’t
because “on one and the same territory, local residents can scarely make ends
meet, but those who have come from the national republics are flourishing.”The first live in poverty; the second in
relative luxury.

Karmazin says that “the steppe from
Stavropol to Saratov is slowly but surely being Islamicized” and already it is
the case that there are “enclaves” across this area which are entirely “outside
of the legal field of the Russian Federation.”There is corruption, and there is even slavery.

One local resident, Yevgeny
Boyarsky, who heads the New Force social movement, says that he remembers
Grozny where he was born in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “Then we saw an
explosive growth of nationalism. Out of the republic fled up to 300,000 people,
thousands of Russians speakers were killed even before the beginning of the first
Chechen war.”

He says that in his opinion, the
situation in Stavropol kray “is now at the brink of that Chechen situation.”

Yury Yefimov, a political scientist
at Stavropol’s State Agricultural University, agrees and goes further: In his
view, Stavropol is on its wy to becoming “a Russian Kosovo” because the
Russians aren’t reproducing themselves and are leaving while the non-Russians
are growing rapidly and arriving in large numbers.

“Migration processes,” he continues,
“play into the hands of the Caucasus ethnoses. If earlier there was an enormous
flood of ethnic Russians from the national republics, now, this has exhausted
itself: all who could have already left.” And the consequences of this pattern
is “the especially difficult situation in the eastern portion of the kray.”

In many villages and districts, the
non-Russians now outnumber the Russians, often significantly, and when that
tipping point is reached, Russian flight accelerates and the influx of
non-Russians increases as well.

There is a deeper reason for this
shift than many may think, Yefimov says. Russians remain focused on the state
to take care of them while the non-Russians only need land to make a profit and
to live well. Given the weakness of the state, the Russians feel themselves
cast adrift; but the non-Russians think that this gives them the space to act
as they want.

Karmazin says that he concluded his
visit “with mixed feelings” but with a deepened understanding that only those
nations whose members are prepared to act on their own rather than wait for or
depend on the state have a future in the region. At present, the Russians are
not among those that do.